Daniel Johnson, vocal coach

"I was completely shocked when Piper told me they were petitioning for legal emancipation. I couldn't believe that the parents were so willing to help this child pursue this career that they were willing to have her made an adult, at the age of fifteen."

Maggie, Oprah March 2003

"I had a lot of people tell me I was making a huge mistake and that I shouldn't do it, she had plenty of time, she should focus on school… but she was already proving to me that she could do this. She'd never been the best at academics but her grades never suffered, she was juggling all these responsibilities and bearing up remarkably well… we agonised over it, but we just didn't want to hold her back any more. There was a risk that once she was emancipated we wouldn't be able to rein her back in if we did feel she was taking on too much, but in the end Jonathan just said we had to trust in the way we'd raised our daughter, so we did, and she never let us down."

Janet Holden, dance instructor

"She was very sensible about the whole thing once she was made a legal adult. She stuck in school until she had her GCSEs, which was only another year, I remember her missing lessons to do her coursework, and she made sure that she wasn't going for jobs that would happen in term time, not even at half term when they had a week off. She always waited for the holidays proper, and I remember thinking that this girl had her head on straight and that was going to see her far. Didn't realise quite how far, though!"

It was a far cry from the usual route of child stars - she worked as a back up dancer in numerous music videos and on tour with various British groups and artists, often for long hours and little recognition - she was firmly in the background, not the spotlight, unlike future husband Justin Timberlake who by this point was already experiencing European success with *NSYNC.

Justin Timberlake, husband

"I never had to go through anything like that with my career, the way I went straight into the band from the TV show, but Piper was competing in an adult world trying to get her foot on the ladder and work her way up, and I got total respect for her managing to do that at fifteen because even though I was in an adult world, I was headhunted for it. She had to dive in there and act like an adult and convince everybody she was one and that she was there because she'd worked to be there. I'm not sure I could have done that at fifteen."

Piper

"It was hard. There were days when I did feel too tired or like everybody was way more mature than me and I couldn't keep up. There were days I saw a nasty side of the business that I felt too young to cope with. But I wanted it so badly I just learned to push that pain threshold, and ultimately if you face these things rather than running it makes you stronger for it. It made me better and stronger for it."

Maggie

"We worried about her, of course we did. There were nights she'd phone home crying and Jonathan would threaten to jump on a plane and bring her back. We didn't like watching her struggle, no parent does. But this was the decision we had made as a family and we had to let her see it through. She wanted it and no matter how down she was, the second we talked about bringing her home she always said no, I want to stay."

Then, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, she met a man who would change her life. She flew to Atlanta to audition for Janet Jackson's upcoming American tour, and in the rehearsal studio she bumped into a young dance protégé who had been nurtured by none other than Michael Jackson, and who would later bring her to a fateful meeting with *NSYNC and her future husband.

Piper

"Wade. Wade, Wade, Wade."

Maggie

"God, those two. I remember the first time she announced this boy was coming to visit her from the US and I was totally taken aback, wondering who on Earth this kid was, hoping to God she hadn't gone and done something stupid like fallen head over heels for some punk kid... and then he walked into the house and it was like they'd never been apart and they were finishing each other's sentences. And now he's like the son I never wanted!"

Piper

"We just hit it off. He kept showing off, trying to do the moonwalk to impress me, but it didn't matter because we just sparked and then we both got picked for the tour and we got so close because we were travelling all the time and there's not much else to do but talk."

Wade Robson, choreographer and best friend.

"That moonwalk schtick was so lame; I don't know why she's still friends with me! We hit off it off, had a very ill fated month or so when we tried to date but we quickly realised we were just pals, but we also had a little bit of a competitive vibe going, similar age, both just a little bit full of ourselves because we were so young and scored this huge gig. I think we were in the same boat, and we'd both been working all our lives and had both had to immigrate to whole new countries… we just had so much in common that it drew us together, we knew how each other felt."

Piper

"The thing about Wade is that me and him are on the same wavelength, always have been. Creatively, personally, we're in each other's heads. I get stick for working with him so much but there's just nobody else on the planet who knows my vision and what I want to happen on a stage better than Wade, and he and I just work together like this well oiled machine, by this point it's almost telepathic."

Johnny Wright, manager

"A lot of people do accuse Piper of favouritism over Wade, but it's never been something that bothered her management or Jive Records because they come up with the goods, every time. There's a very deep friendship that produces some incredible work, and personally I respect that because that's what an artist needs, they need those people around who can push them and keep taking them to that next level, who know them that well and know their strengths and can capitalise on them, so long as Wade and Piper keep challenging each other like that I'm very happy to sit back and let them keep doing their thing."

Piper

"Wade looks after me. He's a good person to have around because we're so close we can be brutally honest with each other and he will tell me if I'm working too hard or if I need to slow down. And we have fun, you know, we're like brother and sister and he brings me down a peg or two when I need it."

Wade

"The Janet tour was fun. Piper's very serious about work and because she's been so focussed on it all her life people think she does nothing else, but when she's on her downtime she's real funny and a blast to hang out with, and we definitely got into some mischief on that tour. There are stories I could tell, but unfortunately she's got too much dirt on me for me to tell you any of 'em!"

Janet Jackson, TRL September 2005

"Of course I'm so, so proud that somebody who was part of my tour family and worked for me has now reached the heights that Piper has. She was a lovely young thing, her and Wade always ran around entertaining everybody and lighting the place up, and you need that kind of young energy on a tour but she was always very mature for her age and I'm just thrilled she is where she is now."

The friendship lasted beyond the limits of the tour, and the two would often run into each other on the dance circuit. Wade's connection with Michael Jackson even landed Piper a spot dancing for him at a Mexican concert special, a show beamed to millions of viewers worldwide.

Wade

"This wasn't the little talent shows she'd been doing in New York. This was Michael Jackson. I think that was the moment when she really felt like she'd got this dancing thing down."

But even dancing for the King of Pop wasn't enough to satisfy Piper's growing ambition. After immersing herself in dancing for so long, her attention turned back to her first love - music.

Piper, Ellen February 2006

"You know, it wasn't that I wasn't enjoying dancing, but I peaked so early. Where do you go from there, what's new, what's to challenge you when you've done all that by eighteen? And I'd put music on the back burner for so long to focus on my dancing that I was getting itchy feet for that, and the fact that I could do music and then incorporate dance into performing so I wasn't having to make that choice between the two any more… it just made sense."

She returned to England to her parents, and with the help of her father and her former vocal coach Daniel Johnson began to record demos, building up a repertoire that they could then approach record labels with.

Daniel Johnson

"She worked hard. It wasn't cheap, but her father and I came up with the money to help her out, she paid for the rest with the money she'd earned dancing, and we managed to get her recording time with some decent producers. I think we got her through… maybe three recording sessions before she began complaining about the quality for the material. It wasn't that she was being a diva or that she was too big for her boots, she was just very downhearted and worried that the quality of the songs wasn't good enough to interest labels. In hindsight she was right, but at the time we were just taking what we could get."

Piper

"They were crappy songs. Crappy, bubblegum songs. I've never had a problem being a pop artist or doing commercial music, but I do have a problem doing low quality music. And it was getting me down and I was going home and taking it out on the piano and then I just started tinkering around with melodies one day, and with everything I was picking up from the producers I was working with… it suddenly occurred to me maybe I could do this, and I started messing around with lyrics and everything I remembered taking in from all those classic songs I'd pulled apart and studied when I was younger and it just clicked. Everything else up to that point had been more of a learning process, kinda polishing rough edges, but that just always made sense to me from the get go."

Justin, MTV UK's Trevor Nelson April 2004

"She's an awesome songwriter. She has an ear for melody and this instinctive vibe for what lyrics go what with what kind of groove, and she knows how to get that vision in her head out into the mike and onto instruments. It's just a gift she has."

Maggie

"I remember her playing Jonathan the first ballad she wrote, and he came out into the yard where I was weeding and he was white. Totally white faced. The way he looked I thought something terrible had happened, but then he informed me that our daughter had written a song he didn't think would be out of place in the number one spot."

She never recorded the track, but she did record a number of other self penned songs that made it onto her demo. The tape was sent via an agent friend of Daniel Johnson's to various major record labels including Virgin, RCA, Sony and more. There was no joy for six months, until by chance an executive at smaller label Wildstar heard the tape.

Gary Wilkes, former executive at Wildstar Records

"I was looking for a new act, a gap in the market, and at that time Britney and Christina weren't huge yet and they didn't have a British equivalent, but Wildstar was more of an urban label so although I had the gap in the market I didn't have an artist that I felt could branch both pop and urban music. Until this tape lands on my lap, the note with it tells me that this kid has just turned eighteen, has been around the world as a dancer already and that she's writing her own songs. I had to hear it just to believe it, and of course I was expecting nothing, just one more tape to send back. Except it's Piper bloody Tenshaw and the range on this kid is unbelievable. And Daniel Johnson's number is at the bottom of the letter, and I call him and ask him if he's having me on, if she really wrote this stuff. And he says yeah, yeah, she did, and he gives me the numbers of producers who can back him up. I call Jacob Finch, who I'd worked with before, knew him, knew he was reliable, and I ask him if this is for real. He tells me it is, and I swear my heart near exploded out of my chest because this was going to be the girl who made the label's fortune."

Piper was ecstatic.

Piper

"This was so much bigger than anything I'd done before. This was it. This wasn't backing somebody else up, this is me. All me. They wanted me."

Ben Houghton, cousin

"I just remember the way my mom screamed when Uncle Jonathan called and told her. We all thought this was it, she was gonna explode and be this megastar."

The label wasted no time in rushing Piper into the studio. Pairing her up with an A list cast of producers, the cream of the British music scene, they had four songs recorded when disaster struck.

Maggie

"We still don't know what it was, but one day she woke up and she couldn't talk, was in a lot of pain, and we figured she had tonsillitis or something. We called Gary, who had been overseeing the sessions, and we told him and said we'd get her to the doctor and she'd probably be off for a week. We had no idea, we weren't worried."

Piper, Regis and Kelly June 2005

"They told me that I had nodules and this horrible infection, and I had 'em bad. I had to have an operation to fix 'em, and they told me that if I ever wanted to sing again I had to rest my voice for a year. Which, when I was in the middle of recording my first album, was a disaster."

Maggie

"She cried. Oh she cried."

Wade

"She was on the phone to me in tears, except she'd then feel bad about it in case the sobbing was hurting her voice. It's a real knockback when you've just had your big break and everybody's setting you up to be a star and then fate just whips it out from under you like that. It's a rough business and you have to deal with rejection and setbacks, but it seemed almost cruel."

Then came the big blow - Wildstar wasn't prepared to wait until she was able to resume recording. A few weeks after her diagnosis and the operation to remove the throat nodules, Wildstar informed Piper that they were terminating her contract and dropping her from the label.

Gary Wilkes

"I fought her corner, I really did. But it was a small label which had other acts to serve and only so much money to do it, and we could not afford to have an artist on the roster who wasn't earning. It would have been one thing if she was recording and we were making progress to that point, but the powers that be said we couldn't afford to delay everything a year because it'd then be two years before we got any material out and that's too long in the music industry. The opening would have been gone, and quickly was gone because then a young lady named Billie Piper came out in England as the British answer to Britney. They wouldn't keep Piper, no matter how I tried to convince them the kid was worth waiting for."

Wade

"I remember Gary, I met him a couple times, he seemed like a cool dude. He was always real gung ho about Piper, really believed in her, and I have no problem believing he tried to get them to keep her. I remember Jonathan and Maggie always spoke real highly of him, even after the label dropped her."

Maggie

"Gary was wonderful. He was very supportive of her even after the label dropped her, and he encouraged her to keep writing at a time when she felt like giving up altogether. He also arranged some work experience for her with more producers, which is how she wound up becoming one herself."

Daniel Johnson

"It was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. Nobody had worked harder to get to that point than Piper and to see it all snatched away from her like that… it was terrible to watch. My heart broke for her."

Coming up in Part 3 - after the crushing disappointment of being dropped, Piper suffers an even bigger loss as she loses the most important figure in her life. "My wife still gets real upset when people mention her Dad now. I can't even think about what it was like then." "I just didn't know how to go on stage without him there to watch."